Cathbad's mound lay in a forest near Loch Ramor. The oak grove nemeton he presided over was half an hour's walk from there. A huge boulder, apparently a natural formation, hid the entrance to the tumulus completely from prying eyes. Only when one stood adjacent to both the stone and the mound on the right did the recess in the boulder appear and, within it, the opening into the mound. The only remaining opening was a smoke-hole in the crest of the tumulus, and the smoke rising from it on cold days had been used as proof of more than one tale of the Sídhe. That was just fine so far as Cathbad was concerned: it kept the curious at a safe distance.

By the time Cathbad reached the tumulus, even the smoke would have been invisible in the darkness. He wove his way through the forest by memory, brushed the stone with his shoulder as he passed from view behind it. Inside, he went about his business as purposefully as a blind man. A tallow lamp awaited his hand just where he reached for it in the blackness. He brushed his hazel wand across it. The lamp flared up, spitting and hissing like a contentious cat, and casting a hollow light about the cavern.

The walls of Cathbad's temple were covered with carvings, runes and drawings. One set of spirals represented his nineteen-year-cycle calendar. Another, the year divided into feastnights and lunar equinoxes. The rough floor contained a small rectangular hole in its centera shaft that descended far below, perhaps to the bowels of the earth. Into it, the Druid threw sacrifices, old wands, and his garbage. Near the shaft stood a great black cauldron. Flanking it as they flanked the inside of the cave entrance behind him, two squared-off pillars rose up to the low cavern ceiling. The pillars contained six niches apiece. Each niche contained a severed human head.

As the tallow candle took life and illuminated the entire cavern, the heads opened their eyes and, yawning, looked at Cathbad. He ignored their gaze as he passed them. Setting down his bundle, he muttered, "Darker out than a Fomor's shit."

"Ooh," responded the heads, "that's dark." They appreciated his occasional bits of description of the world outside that they no longer played a part in. These were Cathbad's vathi, his seers.

With some reluctance, Cathbad straightened and asked, "What have you for me?"

"Riddles," answered a head by the door, and the session began. "A big future," said another, high up on the right of the cauldron.

Cathbad pinched his beak of a nose. He would have preferred to sleep before wading into their twisted truths, but the vathi would resent his napping after having awakened them and would babble out all sorts of insults at him. He would have to put a spell of silence over them, and he was much too tired to do that. Then he was sure that, later, they would tangle their riddles that much morethey had done so before.

Groaning as he squatted down beside the cold cauldron, he said, "All right, unravel your riddles." Casually, he tapped his wand to the base of the cauldron. A small fire sprang up, catching the peat bricks laid around the pot.

"Tell me whose immense future do we inspect tonight"he rubbed his hands together before the fire"and let's not waste our time with sniggering comments, please. I'm very tired. I'm doing this first only out of my deep regard for you. So, who are your conundrums about?"

Between pillars the heads exchanged gleeful glances. In unison they proclaimed, "You!"

Cathbad coughed and stopped rubbing his hands together. "Me?!"

"Mmm."

"A future coming."

"A virgin dethroned."

"A king dethroned, too, yes."

"And a charmed child on his seat." Then, at some secret signal, the heads fell silent, waiting, watchful.

Cathbad drew himself back up on his feet, his vexation plain. "Is this some preposterous joke? I'm very near throwing the lot of you out into the night. I'll let the wolves have you, you trophies for ravens. You're fortunate I'm so weary or I'd do it this second, but don't try me further."

One of the heads giggled but stopped abruptly as the others glared at him. So what if the Druid had threatened to toss them out so many times it was ludicrous? This once he just might do it.

A female head stated, "A royal woman, daughter of the Saffron Heel and twelve foster fathers. She dwells on an isle not far but distant. Fierceness flows in her veins. Her army is full female all fuliginous in fashion. You follow?"

"Fluently, thank you," he answered, only slightly mollified by the disclosure.

Another head took up the chant. "She wears no man, nor has she ever, though she's worn out enough to have two daughters in tow. Yet it's the son of her womb who rules seven years hence from his birthnight."

"The father is a priest of great power with a nose to match. His wits are addled by half and he's quite forgot how to play crown and feathers

"You could be buried beneath a hill, my little wit," shouted Cathbad, "like Bran!"

The head pouted. "I say what I see, head-master. Don't blame me.

"Head-master," Cathbad grumbled. "You say I am to locate a specific warrior, convince her to lie with me? To make a king?"

"Ah, he sees to the very core.

"He does, he does."

"A regular riddle-master, a mage of mazes, a whit of a wit--"

"Hold your tongue!" bellowed the Druid.

"I would, great Cathbad, but I've no fingers to clasp it." The heads all burst into laughter at that. He had never seen them so audacious.

Frustrated, he marched out of the room. The laughter died quickly behind him as the heads speculated on what he meant to do. When he returned, they fell silent. He had changed his clothing, exchanging his robe for a white animal's skina bull's skin. He went to the cauldron again, but this time leaned over the edge and looked into it.

"Bull-dream! Bull-dream!" someone shouted. "Hush!" admonished another; then, to him, "Wait, we'll tell you straight."

"Plain speaking," assured the head below that one.

The Druid paused to reply to the room at large, "Thank you, no. I'll find out for myself the truth of what you say without playing the fool for a bunch of horseless headmen."

"Well, I'll be screwed."

"Not again in this life!" came the shouted rejoinder. The heads, as he had anticipated, began arguing and insulting one another. While they babbled like a feasting crowd, Cathbad set to work. He lit a torch off the cauldron fire, then went through an opening far back in the chamber that led deep into the caverns below. Here the walls were of cracked crystal, and stalactites hung down like rainbow ice. Here no wind had ever blown and the air smelled as old as the tales of the Tuatha de Danann. The bull-robed Druid went on, sure of his path, passing deeper into the earth's secret places. Creatures with blind, egg-yolk eyes skittered at his comingthings that had evolved without ever having felt the warmth of Belenos' Eye. Some hissed and fled, others stood their ground, sensing the immensity of the being passing by. Their tiny hearts fluttered in their watery bodies, revealing them where they stood. He passed them by, going on until the air had turned arctic and the trickles of water solidified. There he found what he wanteda small ice-encrusted pot much like his cauldron. It contained a dark, frozen substance. After first wrapping tatters of the bull-skin around each hand, he grasped the rings on the pot and pulled it free from where it had frozen to the cavern floor. Then, grunting from the effort but alert and revived by the cold, he carried it away with him back through the corridors of eternal night, around and out like a small sea creature escaping from a nautilus. The torch, lying across the lip of the pot, rolled back and forth and threatened at any moment to set fire to his wrists.

The echoes of voices came to him first, long before he saw the light of the tallow. The heads were still slandering one another and, by the sound of it, tempers were flaring. It was no wonder, he thought, that they had led abbreviated lives. He entered among them again and set his cold burden into the center of the large cauldron.

The heads broke off their arguing. "What's that he's doing?" one of them asked the group in general.

"Tarbfeis," replied another, helmeted, head.

"What's that?"

"You must be new here," answered a head from below. "He does it now and again. His bull dreamreveals the identity of kings, the whim of the weather, the boils on a squatter's backside." The head snickered.

"Yes, but what's the secret?"

"Ah, well, now," began the helmeted head mysteriously, "that would be telling."

"You mean you don't know," accused the one.

"Of course I know," insisted the other. "Sort of."

Cathbad touched his wand once to the large cauldron. The iron began to glow, at first in a circle around the tip of the stick but soon spreading to ring the lower half of the container. The color rose by degrees until the whole cauldron glowed red.

Watching, he looked as he had at dawna figure cast in flame, his deep-set eyes molten in carmine shadow.

Steam rose out of the cauldron, then a burping, bubbling sound. The glow began to fade. As quickly as it had heated, the cauldron cooled to black. Moving nearer, Cathbad accidentally touched his wand against the metal again. The wand turned to ash and sprinkled out of his hand. It had run out of power. He sighed. A new one would have to be made. These days he seemed to be fashioning wands every other week. Pretty soon he was going to run out of hazel trees nearby. Maybe he could make do with willow for awhile.

Leaning over the edge of the cauldron, he lifted out the smaller pot. The liquid in it had thawed and now had the consistency of porridge. He set it down, then sat beside it. The heads watched, enraptured.

The thick reddish liquid continued to smoke as Cathbad took a thimble-cup and filled it from the pot. He then chanted over the cup, so softly that the heads could not make out a word of it. No one knows what words put prophecy into the bull's blood.

Cathbad drank the thimble dry. A thin trail of warmth ran down inside him, soon branched out through his limbs, into his head. The blood in the pot started to swirl. A whirlpool appeared in its center. Cathbad stared down into the spinning pit.

The contents of the pot became translucent. Tiny figures appeared through it. The whirlpool rose up and expanded, sucking Cathbad down into the center of the vortex. He said a single word: "fuil." Blood. One segment of the whirlpool slowed and began to spin counter to the rest. This was the point he sought, the stretch of time that concerned him. He released his hold on the present and allowed himself to fall into the riddle of the vathi.

They had not lied to him, his seers. She was there: the daughter of the Saffron Heel.

Nessa.

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